I enjoy FB; it shows me what is going on in the lives of so many friends, some I’ve met in person, many I’ve not.
Messenger has been indispensable while helping me establish meaningful, deep-friendships with a variety of folks who I will likely never meet in person (but I’ll be damned if I’m not gonna try)
Instagram has offered me an opportunity to (virtually) meet a great many people, many in my own community who share a passion for landscape/outdoor photography.
Twitter has exposed me to a variety of people and ideas that would have eluded me otherwise.
Google makes my computing life exceedingly simple. My bookmarks sync between devices as do all my word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation files. My photos are backed-up on Google’s cloud. Many of the PDF files I’ve hoarded along the years are accessible across all devices as well.
Amazon has almost anything that I can possibly imagine delivered to my doorstop in 2 days. They store my photo archive as well. They have a wealth videos avail to watch for no additional cost.
But I have paid the price.
At the expense of a few meaningful relationships, I now have hundreds of acquaintances. They are mostly superficial. Most interactions are meaningless drivel. Memes. Political views. Opinions. Boasting. Leveraging. Salesmanship.
At the expense of choosing what I read and how I think, large corporations now filter the information that I see/hear in an effort to entice me into perpetual engagement and unnecessary purchases. They control what I see and when.
At the expense of my privacy I freely give Google a bounty of information about me. I do the same for Amazon, and then I literally pay Amazon to let me shop with them too.
Imagine … 20 years ago … approaching a sales associate, guarding the entrance to a store in the mall. “Good afternoon. Hi. Please fill out these forms for a moment before entering. Thanks. Yeah – sorry for the inconvenience. If you would please complete these questionnaires about every intimate and personal detail you could possibly imagine, we’ll do you the courtesy of letting you enter and shop here, so long as you allow one of our associates to follow you throughout the store and take notes about each item you look at. But don’t worry, we’ll keep the information behind closed doors in the records department at the back and revisit your file every time you return to update it. But don’t worry, you can trust us; your information is safe – we usually lock the door.”
Fuck that, right?
I’ve become a victim of technological creep – little by little, this is the economy that I have begun to accept as normal. Over time, I have accepted the price of convenience.
I HAD accepted the price of such conveniences, but no longer.
In December, I decided that I was done. I was going to do my best to take control of as much of my internet data/information as I can while trying to alter my online behaviors in a way that they were more consistently aligned with my values.
So I put a plan in place:
(1) Search engine: I was gonna choose Duck-Duck-Go to cut off Google, but they use Yahoo search results and have had a few issues in the past. I chose to go with Startpage.com; they don’t track, offer corrections with misspelling, and offer Google results (just not organized quite as nicely). For a no-track metasearch (Google, Bing, Wikipedia) I use searx.me, but there are times when it is unable to pull Google results due to captcha issues.
(2) I liked the Chrome browser, but (buh-bye Google) moved to Firefox on desktop and mobile – always private browsing, no cookies, no tracking, and extensions running to stop some other malicious stuff that allows websites to follow you online. I found a really nice reference how to do that here.
(3) Raspberry Pi and NextCloud: I moved all my docs from Google Drive to a Raspberry Pi running as a server in my home. It interfaces with my Android phone and my old Chromebook. It is also housing my calendar and contact list, each used to be housed on my Google account. My bookmarks are on NextCloud as well, rather than being held/synced on a Firefox acct.
(4) De-googling my Android device – I had to be diligent in going into each app and controlling permissions to keep Google from knowing anything about me (trusting that they don’t have something secretive in the code that they are not disclosing). Google Maps was replaced by HereWeGo. Authenticator was replaced by DuoMobile. Google’s Messages app was replaced by Signal (and I know that most folks don’t want to add another app that is not-at-all sniffing ubiquity, but messages are fully encrypted between 2 parties if they are both using the app)
(5) I have installed a lightweight Linux OS on my Chromebook – there are a number of Linux systems avail, but I elected to install GalliumOS, which is designed specifically for chromebooks and works almost perfectly – the only thing that doesn’t work is the Volume-down button.
(6) VPN via NordVPN. I was going to go with PrivateInternetAccess – they allow for payment with major retail gift cards (which could even be a Walmart card … why would I pay with a real credit card if I’m trying to NOT be tracked?) and they only ever log email and payment method. But, in the end, NordVPN has better reviews and is based out of Panama, which adds an additional layer of privacy if someone cares about the government’s ability to subpoena records. I also purchased a more powerful router (and flashed BIOS to DD WRT) so that I could have all devices in the home on the VPN without needing to encumber my family with installs on each machine (Christine – understandably – doesn’t want my own digital choices to impact her directly and I do my best to oblige.) My phone has the VPN app for when I’m out of the house as well.
(7) I decided to resurrect my old family blog (www.waldronfamily.info), a virtual space where I used to write a lot until my time was slowly enveloped by SomaSimple and social media. Looking back on those old writings, I regret that I have stopped writing them as I once did. I’ll be able to share family pics/vids there, as well as stories about my family (hosted on the site’s conventional blog) and some ideas/views of my own (like this one, in a category on the site labeled ‘Keith’s Korner’)
(8) I was going to host my own email, but instead, I elected to change over from gmail/hotmail to ProtonMail. ProtonMail is a Swiss-company that offers full encryption and does not track or advertise. It offers a small platform for free and more robust storage for an annual fee.
(9) Peace-out to FB and IG – the IG-thing hurts a bit more than FB in the short-term because I enjoy being able to interact and be inspired by people on that site (including many locals that I might like to one-day meet); I fear that FB will hurt more in the long-run if I lose touch with a few who I have developed a cherished relationship, and there is FOMO with the group chats that we have had as well.
(10) I’m gonna spread out my online purchases to companies other than Amazon – I can usually get stuff at the same price elsewhere, but have to wait longer for shipping (which rarely needs to be that quick). Besides, without everything being a click away, it cuts back significantly on impulse buying.
(11) I’ll buy local and buy with currency … I already try to do this to support small shoppes in my town (hardware store, for instance); I need them to stay in the business for my own convenience (despite larger, corporate stores that are a 15-min drive away)
(12) I’ll make most credit card purchases with a VISA (OneVanilla) gift card, to keep data from my credit card company. It is easy to grab cash from the bank and use it to buy the gift card, which can be used for almost all purchases (except for outside the US)
(13) I’ll continue to have redundancy of important data (banking, projects, photos, videos) with physical back up drives at home and off site
(14) To allow me to engage with other photographers and hobbyists, I going to move to the new Flickr with a ̶n̶e̶w̶ pseudonym ( ̶W̶a̶k̶e̶n̶ ̶M̶o̶n̶k̶ ̶-̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶a̶n̶a̶g̶r̶a̶m̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶K̶n̶o̶w̶ ̶K̶n̶a̶m̶e̶ Hardtop Winkle – it is an anagram of Keith P Waldron). It will afford me the opportunity to store all my photos there for back-up purposes and share images with the public at my discretion, for engagement. I think I’ll also play around with the idea of a photo-blog, but that may not come to fruition.
(15) The only thing that I need to have hosted for me are family videos: I already pay for Vimeo and they have robust privacy features
(16) Youtube subscriptions – I am using Feedly to keep track of new content. If the content is viewed directly in the Feedly app on my device, it doesn’t track. If I decide to view in the Youtube app, I go into Incognito Mode first (and I have history settings already turned off). I also logged out of Youtube on my Roku devices and cast all content from my phone to prevent logging as well.
Perhaps there are few things here or there that I have forgotten, but that it the nuts and bolts of it anyway.
And yeah – I’m staying with Twitter for now. I acknowledge that Twitter is under some pressure right now for censorship, and I am not sure how much of that I want to be a part of in the long-term, but at least nothing I share on Twitter has the guise of confidentiality, like it does on FB/IG. I know that what I am putting out there is for public consumption, I use lists exclusively for viewing content (which controls against advertising/propaganda), and I can control any tracking that they try to implement (for now). Besides, I need to stay ‘connected’ somehow and my list of 15-20 people to keep track of daily (while ignoring the other 300+ that I ‘follow’) seems to take only 5 mins of my day when I take a quick peak in the morning. If I have something important to share via DM, I’ll direct that conversation to my email address.
That’s right – email. I plan to fall back on ‘old tech’ in an effort to keep in touch with those folks who are most meaningful to me in the social-media-sphere. There are 16 people that I hope to become ‘pen pals’ with, all of whom have agreed to give my little experiment a try. I like email: there is no expectation of immediacy with a reply and it is a format that encourages long form writing. This may not be as favorable to other people, though. It often benefits from time in front of a physical keyboard, not just a mobile device. Perhaps that will limit the participation of others. I’m not sure. I’ll need to wait and see.
For now, I plan to spend 30 minutes per day reading/writing emails. If I need more than 30 minutes, the rest of the message can wait until the next day (usually). Sometimes I’ll respond to someone in a month, sometimes two. If it is something important or time-sensitive, maybe I’ll reply in one day … although I am not looking to flood anyone with emails, so I expect that such frequency/immediacy will be reserved for pretty severe shit, such as illness or a death in the family. I need to strike a balance between engaging and being a pest … I think I can pull it off.
Now to see how this all plays out.